While there is no guarantee that winter’s snow is over, after all this is Montana, spring is definitely here with warmer temperatures and the foliage greening up. With an upcoming cross country trip in the offing, it was time to think about some maintenance issues. In my last posting here, I mentioned ordering tires and they came in last week. I figured that as long as the bike would be off the ground, while the wheels were in the shop it was time to tackle a few 16,000 mile maintenance items. Yes, the bike has 30,000 miles on it but I’ve rationalized delaying a few things due to the good build quality from the factory and how other owners on the forum have mentioned the lack of wear on many of the parts, even with longer periods of delayed maintenance.
The main item I wanted to cover was the swing arm bearings. I follow Two Wheel Obsession on YouTube and he has some excellent videos on many jobs including this one. However, with this job he also shows how to pull the relay arm and the main stand, a job that, by the book requires fairing and exhaust removal, or the cutting off and replacement of certain bolts by his method. I decided to defer those items to the 60,000 mile job if everything looked OK on the swing arm this time.
I started the work Thursday (April 11) morning and once the bike was on the motorcycle jack, removing the wheels is more or less a straight forward job. Once the wheels were off, I loaded them and the new tires into the car and took them to Troy at CycleWerx. He said he might have them for me later in the day and I told him I was diving into the swing arm bearings so there was no hurry. He said doing that job was a good thing and that very few people choose to dive into it.
The rest of the day was spent getting the swing arm off the bike. It really was just a matter of following along in the video and keeping track of the various parts. While I do have a pretty good selection of tools, I did make two trips to Harbor Freight to pick up something I needed. The first was for a socketed T50 that was required to pull off the left side shift linkage cover. I, of course had to buy a set. Next, I made another trip to buy a socketed H19. The set I already had only went to H17 and, again, I had to buy a set.
The video shows removal of that side cover as a problem due to the factory installed red Loctite which, in the video, caused the near-rounding off of one of the bolts. His solution was to heat the bolt with a soldering iron. I tried the bolt first and didn’t feel it cracking loose so I first tried by old Vessel impact wrench to no avail. I did the soldering iron trick which I don’t think really did much. I used both my low wattage soldering iron and my higher wattage soldering gun and, using my infrared temperature gauge, could see that not much was heated up, probably due to the bike acting like a huge heat sink. I also read that the red Loctite doesn’t soften until 550°F so maybe it helps, maybe not. I finally got brave/bored, put a socket hex wrench in the bolt and applied steady pressure. It cracked loose as did the others.
That is something not generally covered in many videos that illustrate how to disassemble something, not just the ones from Two Wheel Obsession. It seems they have no problem loosing up anything and that leads me to believe that they do that before the video was shot, retighten, and then make it look like things come apart easily. That’s never real-life. Real life is using PB Blaster, impact wrenches, and long bars for leverage, sometimes followed by drills and helicoils.
Once I had the covers off both sides I pulled the differential and swing arm off and called it a day.
Friday morning I got back to it by first cleaning and checking those swing arm bearings. They are not overly greased but were still adequately packed and felt pretty good. I went ahead and packed the main ones and the others. Cleaning and lubing was the order of the day as I reassembled all the pieces. In the middle of the morning, Troy called so I went and picked up the wheels with the newly mounted tires. He reminded me to take it easy when breaking in these new shoes.
Putting everything back together was relatively easy, following the video and the service manual, and torquing as I went. I use two torque wrenches as one (from Harbor Freight) does the low settings and the other (Craftsman) gets to the higher settings. Both are both 3/8” drive and that socketed H19 I picked up is a 1/2” drive. No problem, just use an adapter. Hmmm, just the one I didn’t have. Back to Harbor Freight for a small set of adapters.
I was pretty proud of myself getting things back together in an order, where I didn’t have to stop and take something off to get something else on first, until I was mounting the rear brake caliper stabilizer bar. I fiddled around a bunch and realized that the rear axle had to come back off. It was 5:30pm and I was getting tired so I called it a day and went and made a Mexican pizza for dinner.
Saturday morning I got up early for a 7-mile run, which helped loosen up my stiff body. Two days of working on the ground with all the up and down for the right tool had had its impact. When I got back to the job, it went smoothly and before long it was done. Before I put the plastics back on I pulled and cleaned the air cleaner, which looked pretty good.
All that was left was a test ride but I had other things to do so that had to wait until early evening when I took it on the Shorey Road loop and everything checked out fine. On Sunday I did another 20 miles, carefully breaking in the new tires, and feeling for anything that might be loose. Everything is fine and I think the bike is ready for its cross country trip at the end of the month.
While this turned into a 2-1/2 day job, I was taking my time, took a few breaks, had to chase after tools, etc. If I had it to do over again, just getting the swing arm off, I’d say I could do it in 2 hours. The next time I’d tackle the bolt cut-off method to get the relay arm and center stand off. With the new tool acquisitions, I’m into it for about $65 so that’s not a bad deal.
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